As a player since Vanilla, I think you got this square. It's not all of it. You can't get it all in a brief synopsis, but I think you nailed what you got, especially the Cata and MoP stuff.... trying to pass grinding off as content... ugh. I called it when I was on the beta. My hardcore friends shouted, "GOOD". What's funny is that only ONE of them even plays anymore. ALL of them have left the game. The grind killed recruiting on for raiding on all, but the most populated servers. So, it wasn't just content for "how do I spend my time when I log on", but also content for raid prep.

MoP killed the Semi-Casual which is a shame because that bridge was a pretty crucial part of the WoW player ecosystem.

It feels like if you weren't the raid leader (which I've never been unless you count my Naxx/AQ group during BC) hardcore raiding took up way less of my time in vanilla, BC, and most of Wrath than it did in Cata. The old time commitment would be easy for me now, Cata was a pain and it sounds like MoP was similarly annoying except instead of running LFR a million times to get specific people their T13 set bonuses (now that they changed the loot rule) there was a lot of dailies you HAD to do every day to get rep up?

And now they are saying the next expac you can't cap valor through raiding either? A lot of the WoW players have gotten older and have more responsibilities like job, family, etc what is so bad with allowing us to just focus on the part of the game they enjoy the most without feeling at a disadvantage? I'd be more likely to come back if I knew I could just raid, only raid, without being at a disadvantage, once the initial once an expac leveling/gearing up in 5 mans process was over, with lots of optional content that I could do the days I happen to have more free time. Instead of having to feel like I need to log on every day and do 10 non-raiding things to get some advantage for raiding. Dailies were a lot more fun in BC when the rep was mainly for vanity items...

Feeling's mutual from every self-important tosser who comes to these forums pitching a tantrum because someone said something they didn't like. Seriously, dude, grow up. This isn't worth wasting hours of your life over because you don't like reading the same replies in a thread that's about as inspired, original, well-written, and well-thought-out as 50 Shades of Grey. You want original replies? Make an original thread.

1. In BC, the game was riding on Vanilla. Compared to other MMO's at the time, WoW was easy, and extremely accessible. However as time dragged on...

2. Sunwell comes out, and people find this game isn't easy! Wrath comes out and the game becomes easy mode. (yet not that easy because heroic Lich King took forever to kill). Yay! 12 million subs!

3. Cataclysm comes out, and it's the first expansion Ghostcrawler has been around for the entirety of. GC and his "WoW, dungeons are hard" mentality, backfired. T11 is hard, and so are the dungeons that go with it. LFG has a 45 minutes queue, because the dungeons take 2 hours to clear. Current raids are no longer puggable due to their difficulty. Millions leave. They realize by Firelands, and the tier that followed that, that was a wrong choice and make the game easy again. Too late though for Blizzard, the subs continue to bleed.

4. Instead of admitting fault with Cataclysm and try to emulate Wrath, they go crazy in MoP, give us Panda's, no tangible bad guy, and make it the least casual friendly expansion to date by trying to pass off grinding as content. Casuals don't have time, nor want to do 40 dailies a day...on every character. As a result, subs are at the lowest ever.

Everything in this post is wrong. Do you even play WoW or did you just cut and paste this post from "common things people QQ about on the forums"?

Also, if the only thing you have to bitch about in MoP is that it's not casual friendly...

As always, most of Blizzard's decisions are not based on the random forum raging of various WoW-players. It's based on player data from in-game testing and the PTR, which tells them what abilities are used the most, the most common talent configurations, the glyphs used by everyone, and the feedback from people actually testing the newest stuff on the PTR.

It's understandable that the developers get a bit pissy towards the same old posts they see every day. As a moderator here for years now I've done the same when it gets to be a bit much, when everyone is negative just to be negative instead of actually posting something useful and constructive (negative or positive).

I think Blizzard has too high an opinion of their own methods of acquiring player data. I was a very active player for 5 years, and the only chances for feedback I had were rating GMs responding to trouble tickets and a brief set of questions when I unsubbed. PTR feedback is solicited but then selectively (if not totally) ignored. And going by their own internal data alone is idiotic. It's like running a retail store and basing future purchasing decisions solely off of what you sold over the counter. (Widgets didn't sell much because they're buried at the bottom of an isle in the back where no one sees them? Too bad for widgets, because "everyone hated them" based off customer purchasing.) It seems to never have occured to Blizzard to try bringing in outside expertise such as J.D. Powers to give them a different perspective. Any of the three telcos I've worked for would be horrified at Blizzards apparent lack of customer research. (Those companies had just as much internal customer data as Blizz, but none of them felt that it was adequate to base business decisions off of.)

To me, Blizzard does come off as arrogant. Failing to develop new channels for information on player satisfaction as the game lost subscribers for years seems to demonstrate exactly that.

"In today’s America, conservatives who actually want to conserve are as rare as liberals who actually want to liberate. The once-significant language of an earlier era has had the meaning sucked right out of it, the better to serve as camouflage for a kleptocratic feeding frenzy in which both establishment parties participate with equal abandon" (Taking a break from the criminal, incompetentliars at the NSA, to bring you the above political observation, from The Archdruid Report.)

Does Blizzard blame the player feedback for the huge sub loss which leads to them ignoring player feedback now?

This should be good.

I get the vibe reading all these smartass, passive aggressive replies from devs on about every topic that they think they know better and aren't just ignoring players, they're actively "putting players in their place".

You're reading into things. They've not been passive aggressive, to what I see. They simply respond honestly with how they view things with their design philosophy.

Meanwhile, wow has shown a loss in subs in all but 1 quarter for 33 months straight. I get the "it's your fault, subscribers" vibe when they talk about cata especially, harder dungeons seems to be the #1 topic. They started pandering to people who were new to MMORPGs and did NOT want to spend a lot of time on a daily basis in their virtual world. Then they SLIGHTLY increased difficulty (compared to wotlk heroics) for cata heroics and are pointing to that as a turning point when in reality, the people who had issues with that are still all over the place. They were such a large part of the majority that making any group of them happy was gonna piss off or annoy the other groups by default.

It's because the only thing Cata had at endgame were heroics. There was no alternative. If you or you and one friend wanted to do stuff, you needed guild support to do heroics lest you be matched with people who didn't know the mechanics and were going to be a headache. This being all that endgame had to offer turned a lot of people off, myself included.

this part shows their snarky attitude and passive aggressive tone (then their bullshit coveryourass move)

Q:you guys talk about ability bloat and I see the best way to address that is the revert some of the class homogenization

A:Sure. What useful ability are you willing to give up? (Source)
AThat wasn't supposed to be sarcastic BTW.) (Source)

It's a valid question.

and i'm sure the meatshields will say what they always say, but here is the thing

EQ was the #1 MMORPG around when Sony decided they knew best. 12 months later it wasn't the #10 MMORPG around.

i feel like blizzard tried to kiss everyone's ass and now that they realize they can't make everyone happy, they're bitter

Why would Blizzard be bitter about having the #1 MMO on the market since 2004?

Anyway, your post is total gibberish. WoW subs have been a big inverted inverted parabola like a lot of games. It got steadily more and more popular, peaked then started to decline. Because it got old, quite a simple relationship there. How many games can you name that 5-6 million people are willing to pay $15 a month for after 8 years?

The only thing unusual about WoW is that it has completely dominated the MMO landscape for an amazing amount of time. It's unprecedented.

Why does it have to just be "The game got old" or "The game got worse"? I don't think there's just ONE reason yet everyone seems to insist there's only one reason, whichever side they are on (the old game side or the crappier game side). I think it's a combination of a few things. I think Cata being disliked by a lot of people sped up the decline, but I think there would definitely have been some decline even if Cata were better liked.

just give up and admit reality, wow didn't peak 33 months ago then get super old overnight, that's fucking ridiculous. it PEAKED at year 6, it is now where it was during year 3

the rise in subs from bc to cata was called "meteoric", "dominant", all this other positive shit
but the reverse is no big deal? come on, that's bullshit

blizzard is shitting themselves looking for an answer, but they don't have it, they think you're all too stupid to know what you want and ever year a new MMO launches and takes a 2 million subs

in 2014 ESO launches on PC, xbox2 and ps4.

skyrim sold 14,000,000 copies (85% on consoles) so expectations for total sales are over 10,000,000 for the first year

meanwhile rift is still high quality, gw2 is high quality and better for casuals than wow could ever be, wildstar is coming out, ff is gonna snag a chunk

the problem isn't wow's age. it's become a fine piece of art that was painted over again and again and again until you couldn't see wtf it was anymore. it just became a lot of nothing interesting

age isn't the issue. it was old 3 years ago when it peaked. it's trying to appeal to everyone so most of the game isn't appealing to everyone.
if they don't figure out who they want to appeal to, they'll end up appealing to nobody at all. they have to pick something and stick with it. appealing to everyone has failed miserably

I reply with so what.

So what if subs are dropping?
So what if they dont know why
So what if they if they go out of business.
You either like their product or you dont, no need to get your knickers in a twist arguing over why, its a game.
Play a different game, there's loads on the market.

Arguing with facts you don't have to other people who also don't have the facts is down right hilarious

No. Blizzard doesn't blame player feedback for huge sub losses. They may blame it on a lot of things, but feedback isn't one of them.

Is Blizzard as a very successful dev more heavy handed with players in their communication? Sure, because they can be. Smaller houses have to deal with customers with kid gloves.

Is this healthy? Hell, no. Far too many gamers lose their collective shit over really minor changes. I realize we put time and energy into these games. Enough to call them a hobby more than "just games". That said, the grief some of the devs are subjected to for their decisions in this capitalistic system is beyond the pale. Death threats? Threats of physical violence? The constant barrage of rancor and debasement? Why? Because a talent got a 12% nerf? Good people are leaving the industry because they don't need the abuse. And how does THAT make better games?

We vote with our dollars. Be civil. Talk. If the devs don't want to develop a product that you enjoy and you cannot reconcile their choices, YOU can send a message with your dollars that trumps ANY message they can send.

For devs that sell retail games, it still matters because you can just boycott any future offerings. Money talks. And if you bring friends along, then it's a bunch of money.

Devs want to be artists, but they don't want to be starving artists.

Blizzard has a very stark future ahead. Not dark, but stark. The Diablo 3 IP has this Xpac and one more, then done. The SC 2 has one more xpac, I believe. WoW has one more Xpac with clues already dropping like the heirlooms weps from Garrosh going from 90-100 and "the reliable leaker" already leaking the zones and levels and they are, in fact 90-100.

So, other than Hearthstone which like the WoW TCG is unlikely to have the span of WoW or D2, there is only Titan on the horizon that we know about. That's it ONE IP for all of Blizzard and no word of any units working on any other games.

WoW is by far Blizzard's biggest IP and only MMO exposure. Titan is an MMO. We know very little about it, but we do know this.

Blizz has already stated that more players have left than are playing now. So the total number of people who've played WoW is probably upwards of 20 million players if not more. These are going to be players with various levels of experience with Blizzard as a company. WoW is pretty involved. Most folks will probably have had some interaction with Blizzard in some capacity be it billing, customer service, GM or CM. Virtually everyone has opinions about their class and how it's been handled.

And you can BET your last dollar that all of that will be weighed and measured when Titan is unveiled.

So, has WoW lost it's way? I dunno. Maybe this (MoP) is exactly the way they intended. I dunno. I have no way of knowing. Sometimes things go exactly the way you intend and it's the exact wrong way. Maybe they had a vision and it got lost in the details of delivering the game. Again, I dunno.

I do know that fretting won't change anything.

As a player since Vanilla and someone who fought the forum wars over Ele Shaman stuff since BC and yeah, the Devs totally ignored the PTR feedback for Ele Shaman multiple times, I'm over it.

I play when I want to. I don't raid anymore. I play what works on my schedule as I see fit and take the game on my terms. Once I turned off Achievements in my head, the whole thing became SO much easier. If WoW is #1 or #10 it really doesn't matter. I can understand being upset at the current state of affairs because the community isn't what it used to be and much of that has nothing to do with the age of the game and THAT negatively affects how fun the game is to play with others, e.g. it makes it harder to meet new people and cooperatively play which is the point of mmo's.

That said, advocacy has its limits. One's subscription might be a casualty of the situation, but one's civility shouldn't be.

Last time I checked, they didn't have some magical powers to prevent people from leaving. As well, subscription churn is normal. People quit for all sorts of reasons (and new ones take their place) but the difference here is that Blizzard has managed to have some 30,000,000 users over its lifetime.

I don't know why people repeat that as if it's somehow meaningful. People have always quit and they will always quit. Like you said, that's normal. The difference is that now the number of players returning and new players getting into the game is much lower than the number of players quitting. For whatever reason players no longer find Blizzard's offering enough value for their money.

That's why Blizzard has been so concerned about making it easy to come back to the game and make it easy for new players to get into the game. And they've undoubtedly succeeded; it's now ridiculously easy for anyone to get into the game at any point. What they've failed at is making people want to get into the game.

Personally I've quit WoW and while it would be incredibly easy for me to get back into the game and "see the content", there is nothing to get back to. My guild is dead, and so is every other 25 man guild on my realm, most of my friends (that I made in WoW btw) have moved onto other games and the prospects of making new friends in the current LFD/LFR/10man system are not good, the end-game model is not appealing at all (I don't give a crap about "seeing the content", I care about meaningful gaming experiences). I also would not recommend the game for my IRL friends (which I used to do) because it's just not good enough value for what Blizzard is asking for it.